Sellers have traditionally utilized promotional games to incentivize buyers to perform a commercial activity. For example, a seller may offer a prize or an opportunity to win a prize in response to the buyer purchasing a product or sampling a service or performing some other predetermined activity. With the advent of the Internet, the techniques and practices utilized to conduct promotions in an online environment create a number of challenges.
One challenge is distinguishing a user, located at a client machine, who desires to participate in an online promotion from a user who does not desire to participate in an online promotion. Typically a user is informed of an online promotion with a first web page that promises a prize, game card or some other promotional device in exchange for the user performing a predetermined activity. The user elects to participate in the online promotion by utilizing the first web page. Subsequently, the user performs the desired predetermined activity usually by requesting a second web page that is associated with the activity. If the user has elected to participate, then the online promotion is delivered.
The above described sequence of events presents a challenge to a client machine that operates on the World Wide Web (WWW) because the WWW is intrinsically stateless (i.e., each Web page is processed without any knowledge of previous pages). Thus, the users election, as requested with the first web page, is not immediately available to the second web page that is associated with the predetermined activity.